I write about 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century poetry with a particular interest in lyric poems and their relation to mental processes. The book I am working on – called The Poet's Mistake – explores the nature of errors in poems and how critics have responded to such errors in complicated ways.

I am also a practising poet and translator. My first collection of poems, The Country Gambler, appeared in April 2016.

Publications

The Poet's Mistake – explores the nature of errors in poems and how critics have responded to such errors in complicated ways.

Hearing Poetry with Charles Lamb

2020

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Journal article

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The Charles Lamb Bulletin

James Merrill’s Puns

2018

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Journal article

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Essays in Criticism

JAMES MERRILL’S FRIEND W. H. AUDEN wrote that ‘Good poets have a weakness for bad puns’. A punster himself, Auden needed it to be true. Most of his puns are of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind. At the end of ‘In Praise of Limestone’, he ironically sees ‘faultless love’ in a limestone landscape; in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, he refers to the Romantic poet’s muse as ‘gay’.1 Byron, also a consummate punster, had no wish or need to pun subtly: aroused from sleep and looking lustfully at Haidee, Don Juan ‘gazed as one who is awoke / By a distant organ’.2 Shakespeare punned even more indiscriminately than Byron. When accused of a cloudy disposition by his uncle-turned-evil-stepfather,...

Good Grief: Paul Muldoon’s Elegies from Ireland to America and Beyond

2016

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Chapter

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Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture

The Country Gambler

2016

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Book

In this accomplished first collection, Erica McAlpine draws truths from the everyday, meditating over contingency and luck and the often-vexed relationship we have to these things. The casual register of her verse belies its formal complexity. Many of the poems are crafted in tight syntactical units of just one or two sentences; others are composed in rhyming sapphics, a meter favoured by the poet Horace, whose guiding voice recurs throughout the collection. Humorous and serious in turn, these quietly virtuosic poems achieve lofty aims: to teach, to advise, to warn - to show, in the manner of a close friend, what the world has to offer, what it sometimes takes away, and what can and should matter most.